Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Why has this taken so long to start happening? The whole Bible-in-the-hotel-room thing is kinda 19th century, don't you think?

Rushdie is the chairman of this year's PEN festival, which is being held at the hotel and other venues around the city and brings together more than 100 writers from 40 nations.

The British-Indian author's list includes mostly well-known literary classics, including Leaves of Grass, the 19th-century poetry collection by Walt Whitman, and The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. The most recent work is 2000's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of only four writers on the list who are still alive today.

Guests wanting to read one of Rushdie's novels, which include the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children, will have to bring their own copies.

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Passing thought

[The novel] is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience... For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.-- Don DeLillo